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Comment by socialismisok | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty partisan political piece seizing on a sentence fragment at the end of a press release.

I understand the desire to want to know more here, like, what did Jeff Lawson mean specifically?

Call me crazy, but maybe the right thing to do is not get bent totally out of shape over a press release and instead just ask, "Jeff, what did you mean by an antiracist lens? Could you explain more about that?"

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HN morning crowd apparently doesn't like the idea of slowing down and asking for reasoning and data.

The point I'm making is that press releases around layoffs are often rushed, and might not actually represent the whole story. Maybe we shouldnt call someone guilty before they get a chance to elaborate?

There are only 2 reasons to put this exact wording in your press release:

a) you are extremely stupid

b) you are super woke and are using this as a signalling opportunity

Extremely stupid people sometimes run billion-dollar companies but it's the exception.

Or, and hear me out, you are trying to be conscious of the fact that layoffs have historically got marginalized communities harder, and you were in a rush to write something that acknowledged that.

That was already listed under option b)

Do you believe that historic inequalities don't exist? Or that paying attention to them is wrong? Or that mentioning that you've done so is wrong?

You must believe one of those if you think my previous is an example of b).

What I believe is that historic outcomes don't need to be "paid attention to" by firing extra white people. That is in fact a blatantly woke thing to do and you're not fooling anybody that it's some kind of apolitical moral fundament that can't be labeled.

Do you have evidence that they fired extra white people? Or is that just your interpretation of "we used an antiracist lens"?

Right now I see a whole lot of assumptions and very little evidence.

Why would they mention it otherwise? Did they fire fewer whites to be "antiracist"? You can play coy but we all know this only goes in one direction, the entire revealed purpose of this ideology is to capture and redistribute resources from whites. Anything that even incidentally benefits white people in particular will be labeled "systemic racism" instead. So my evidence is that I'm taking them at their word.

The best case of your apologetics amounts to: maybe they did normal layoffs and they're just framing it in an arbitrary way so as to acknowledge woke beliefs. Which is a restatement of the virtue signalling described by the commenter above.

When I do annual reviews at my company we have someone be an unbiasing champion. They are looking for things like recency bias, familiarity bias, affinity bias and other cases where a speaker might be appealing to something that isn't demonstrated by data. That person's job is to call people out and say, "you just said you really like that engineers personality, but can you frame that against one of the annual review criteria?" Remove the gut check, focus on the days

You might say that we therefore looking at reviews through an unbiasing lens.

Using an antiracist lens could mean they had one person in the room whose responsibility was to tie the conversation back to data about employee performance rather than, "well, I have a hard time understanding person x, let's fire them."

It's not just black and white, there are many ways this could be an innocent policy by Twilio. It could be what you describe, it could just be "we nominated someone to speak up in the meeting, but didn't really listen to them much".

My point is that we don't know. You've made up your mind, but it's not that simple.

You keep using more and more words to describe the same thing. Again, "antiracism" is oriented monotonically against whites. You won't contest that because if whites ever benefited from it then it would defeat your purpose.

Whether their policy was directly effective toward that end or just another layer of obtuse bureaucratic process like you describe, Twilio is signalling that they applied antiwhite ideology to their employment decisions.

The idea that anti racism means anti white is demonstrably false and trivially disproven.

There are actions you can take that do not have anything to do with whiteness.

If you tell a racist joke or use a racist slur, and I tell you not to do that, I am acting in an anti racist manner. It cost white folks nothing.

All antiracist means is "actively against racism", meaning when you observe racism you take action.

Would antiracism interrupt black people from making a racist remark?

Yes? Why wouldn't it?

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